FreeBSD Installation Notes: IA64
Contents
Installing FreeBSD on Itanium
You need a serial console, and discs one and two. I used release 6.0. (115200Baud, no-parity)
Boot from disc 1.
I used automatic options for everything, and asked to install all. On an I2000 fitted with a Qlogic disc, this failed at partitioning time. The trick is that you have to delete all previous partitions first. I then found problems reading the CD --- turns out this was all because of a corrupted disc image. That'll teach me to check the MD5 sum before burning the CD. (The copy on the Australian mirror was corrupt).
I copied the CD again from the master freebsd FTP site. This worked.
On reboot, the EFI partition isn't set up correctly to boot from automaticly.
I did that by hand, and now everything's hunky-dory.
There seems to be no console output to the VGA device. Or maybe I just haven't found that yet 
FreeBSD 6.1 Notes
I downloaded the "bootonly" disc. Installed with defaults (including wiping hard drive and auto partitions).
Manually boot with EFI shell.
FreeBSD kernel doesn't seem to support the video card on my zx6000, used serial console as above.
Notes for SKI
Building and configuring:
setting up a root filesystem for Ski
- Create the disk image as usual:
dd if=/dev/zero of=image bs=1M count=1024
- Set it up for mounting by attaching it to a vnode:
mdconfig -a -t vnode -f image -u 0 bsdlabel -w md0 auto newfs md0c mount /dev/md0c /mnt
(Turns out this doesn't work properly, so I repeated, omitting the partioning step:
mdconfig -a -t vnode -f image -u 0 newfs md0 mount /dev/md0 /mnt
Build and install everything, and clean up:
cd /usr/src make buildworld make DESTDIR=/mnt installworld umount /mnt mdconfig -d -u 0
Building Kernel for SKI
Copy /usr/src/sys/ia64/conf/SKI to a new file in the same directory, and edit it to add the simulated disc size (turns out that the simulated scsi system doesn't try to find out what the size is)
cd /usr/src/sys/ia64/conf/ cp SKI MySki
Add this line, say:
options SSC_NSECT=2097152 # 1G disc
after the line that says:
options SKI # Include SKI support code
Build by doing:
make buildkernel KERNCONF=MySki
Running Ski
Copy the kernel.debug from /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SKI/ and the bootloader /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/boot/skiload to somewhere you can run Ski. Rename the disk image to ia64-root.fs in the same directory.
Start Ski with:
ski skiload
then say
boot ./kernel.debug
Networking
How do I set up the network? Turns out that there is no simscsi driver. This'll severely limit the usefulness pf this system until/unless MyrtoZehnder's work is complete.
Other IA64 FreeBSD info
- Kernel Source in /usr/src/sys; I haven't worked out how to update yet.
- User-land source in /usr/ports; use portsnap to update
- Memory layout is the same as in Linux: regions 0 through 4 are for userspace; region 5 is kernel; region 6 is 1-1 uncached; region 7 is 1-1 with physical memory (see comment in /usr/src/sys/ia64/ia64/pmap.c)
